From Gramps 3.2.0 onwards, Glade is no longer a requirement for Gramps. The windows GTK runtime listed here is a viable alternative to the gtk-dev package. Note: If you receive a "libglib-2.0-0.dll not found" error in step 6, you will need to rerun the GTK installer and select "Compatibility DLLs" when installing.

The following recommendations are for the validation
of the proper installation of the above listed
GRAMPS software prerequisites.

After installing the items above on a VISTA 64 bit
Ultimate System; GRAMPS could not locate any of
the above software except for Python. This caused
the installer to not install GRAMPS.

After some time researching the issue I found
the solution to my problem in a post by
"steve geo at old.nabble.com".

NOTE:
These steps should validate an installation on XP,
Vista and Windows 7 with the caveat that the command
window on Vista and Windows 7 should be opened using
the "Run as Administrator" (Set your mouse pointer
over the command prompt icon and right-click your
mouse button to display the menu. Click on the
"Run as Administrator" item.)

a) If the gtk demo program does not load
then it is likely you do not have the
gtk bin directory in your path correctly.
(Add your installation directory to your
path environment variable)

3. Change to the directory where you installed the

Python application. By default it is likely
installed at C:\Python26. Once in this folder type
python and press the enter key

a) Your command window should show you information
about the version of Python installed on your
computer and your prompt should be different
and will likely look like ">>>"
b) If you do not have a
"drive:\[your python install directory]" you
should run the python installation program.
c) If your prompt does not change. Re-install
python and watch closely for errors or a
different drive and directory for the installation.

5. If you are updating from a prevous GTK version, make sure you have "Graphviz" folder path AFTER the "GTK2 runtime 2.16" folder.
It should look like this (in this order) PATH=... C:\Program files\GTK2 Runtime\bin;C:\Program files\Graphviz2.26\bin;C:\Program files\GS\GS8.64\bin. If "Graphviz" is located before "GTK2 Runtime 2.16" in the PATH folder order GRAMPS will not start.

3. Re-boot the computer after installing the above dependencies, prior to installing GRAMPS.

4. Install GRAMPS for Windows. You can download the most recent stable version from SourceForge.

Common problems

Installer complains pygtk is missing

This is a very common error to see when all dependencies are not installed or installed correctly. Please make sure that each of the packages required have installed correctly, and re-boot the computer prior to running the GRAMPS installer. We often see users attempting to use other packages to satisfy these requirements that omit something necessary (e.g., glade) which produce this error.

In rare occasions, the installer will complain that pygtk is not installed even though everything is correct. Canceling and re-running the installer seems to fix this problem, although if it happens repeatedly, the error is the more severe situation discussed above. (Anyone know why? Please tell us on the gramps-windows email list.)

GTK+ installer error

If you already have GTK+ installed, perhaps because you have installed The GIMP, Pidgin, or Gnu Cash, the GTK+ installer will not be able to write to some files if one of those applications is running. If you see errors with the GTK+ installer, select Cancel, shut down the other GTK+ applications and run the installer again. (This issue has been reported as GTK+ Installer doesn't handle locked files well to the kind people who make the GTK+ installer for windows.)

Hang when started

In some environments GRAMPS may be unresponsive after displaying its window after being started, particularly after the first time. This can be worked around by running GRAMPS via a BAT file which first sets GRAMPSHOME to an accessible directory, as discussed on the GRAMPS and Windows page.

Additional plugins

There are some features of Gramps that need additional programs to work. There are several different kinds of reports, and the following features need extra configuration to work on Windows.

The Relationship Graph reports (both graphical report and code generator) need an installation of Graphviz. There is a bug in the current stable release, see this example.

The Relationship Graph can not use PDF as output format unless there is an installation of ghostscript. After installation, if gswin32.exe or gswin32c.exe is in the path, PDF should appear as one of the formats in the graphical Relationship Graph report.

Spell-checking:

For spell-checking to work you first need Enchant library and python bindings PyEnchant. Enchant appears to be a generic spell checking library. You can request dictionaries from it, ask if a word is correctly spelled, get corrections for a misspelled word, etc... PyEnchant is a set of language bindings and some wrapper classes to make the excellent Enchant spellchecker available as a Python module. Both are available for windows as single setup file:

Secondly you need PyGTKSpell from gnome-python-extras which is bindings allowing to run Python programs using the GtkSpell library, that extends GTK+'s GtkTextView widget with support for spell-checking. Depending of yours Python version download and install one of these:

Limitations

At this time, there is no intent to package all the dependencies and the GRAMPS package into one installer. This creates a very complex coordination condition between GRAMPS and these other projects. It also means a single 30+ MB download every version change. However work is started to create installable bundle of core dependencies

There have been discussions about trying to install compiled distillations (dynamic link libraries) of these core dependencies to avoid having to install the entire Python and GTK environment, but this work never progressed beyond discussion. For more about this and other Windows issues, see the email list archive.

On Windows Vista you will need to save the executable using "save as" and run it as administrator, otherwise the programs will not be able to write to the registry on installation. To do that right click the saved file and choose "run as administrator".